Search

This article focuses on A Court for King Cholera, a full-page wood engraving published in Punch in September 1852. I argue that the Punch cartoon needs to be appreciated as part of a set of communicative practices that made shared experiences meaningful in unique and vibrant ways, and I discuss the ways in which it reflected and reinforced specific middle-class social anxieties about dirt, disease, the poor and the Irish, and fully engaged with the medical, political, and social debates that crystallised around cholera in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the Punch cartoon needs to be 'read' within the context of both the comic periodical and contemporary socio-medical debates in order to appreciate the complex relationship between graphic medium and political message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]